As the number of content items available on the Internet increases, the demand on search engines is increasing accordingly. The billions of content items available to be served on the global network requires a novel solution to provide comprehensive indexing. In addition to providing comprehensive coverage of such a vast amount of data, search engines are tasked with the additional duty of providing functionality capable of capturing the interest of an Internet user to ensure repeated usage of the search engine.
Although there have been many improvements to search engines, the basic navigational aspects of Internet search engines have remained virtually unchanged since the introduction of the graphical web browser. Currently, major search engines require standard mouse interaction with search results pages, such as mouse scrolling and mouse clicks to select hyperlinks corresponding to search results. Furthermore, a search results page still remains a generally static element. A user is presented with an unchanging list of suggested matches with a title and a brief excerpt of the page, commonly referred to as an abstract. Although many browser applications allow for tab-based navigation of a web page, this navigation is severely limited, only allowing the user to sequentially traverse links in a content item and does not provide for or allow any customization.
There is thus a need in the art for a more dynamic presentation of search results to increase the speed at which a given user may utilize a given search engine, as well as to increase the accuracy of a user identification of relevant content items and thereby increase the return of users to the given search engine. The present invention proposes novel navigation solutions that utilize keyboard interaction to navigate a search results page or other content item.